10 People Who Can Get You The Best Jobs In Tech And Make You Rich

Published 8:15 am, Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The war for talent has never been hotter in Silicon Valley. Sometimes a key hire can make the difference in when a company launches a product—or lands its next financing round.

Think we're kidding? We know one late-stage company that waited to round out its management team before gunning for an eight-figure fundraising.

Even venture capitalists are taking a more hands-on role in recruiting, building up internal operations that keep their portfolio companies fueled with engineers, designers, and salespeople. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and others now have in-house "talent partners."

At Twitter, Ryan took the company from 50 employees to 500. He hunted down statistical geneticists for 23andMe. Now he's got his own firm, Lab 8 Ventures. It's quietly hunted engineers for Amazon as far afield as Australia.

"Most of the companies I'm working with are keeping a pretty low profile and tend to be small, but have generally been NEA-funded," Ryan tells us. (NEA, or New Enterprise Associates, is a venture-capital firm that's backed Juniper Networks, TiVo, and Diapers.com, among other companies; it raised a $2.6 billion fund last summer.)

Like many members of the Google Ventures team, Farrell is a veteran of the search giant. While the venture-capital arm is technically independent, its networks are thoroughly interwoven with Googlers—which means a huge depth of talent at Farrell's fingertips.

"We can give a founder 50 Java resumes in a day," Farrell told VentureBeat last year. Maybe yours could be one of them.